He greeted the family and in the kitchen found some slices of cold roast, all he needed for supper. On the veranda, he sat down, put a foot on the rail, and penciled comments on an architect's site plan for a new foundry he wanted to build in Pittsburgh. The city, situated on two rivers that flowed into the Ohio, would almost certainly become the iron and steel center of the nation in the next ten years. George wanted to be in early, with Bessemer-process converters modified for greater dependability by a technique from Sweden.
Inside, Constance and Patricia sang while Patricia played. "Listen to the Mocking Bird" and "Dixie's Land" — Brett's favorite — and "Hail, Columbia!", which many considered the national anthem; Congress and the public couldn't decide on an official one.
Presently the singing stopped. George kept working until the August daylight failed. He saw the caretaker's lantern moving through the sheet-shrouded rooms of Stanley and Isabel's house next door. The owners were seldom in residence. George didn't miss them.
He tried some mathematical calculations involving a piece of land he was considering for the new plant. He got the wrong answer four times and finally threw the papers aside. The melancholia, formless yet consuming, came on him again. He wandered inside, feeling old and spent.
In the empty library, he stopped beside a polished table and studied the two objects he kept there. One was a fragment of a meteorite — star-iron, it was called in the trade in ancient times. To him, it represented metal's incredible power to improve life or, forged into weapons, eradicate it. Beside the meteorite lay a sprig of mountain laurel, so abundant in the valley. In the Hazard family, by tradition, the laurel was an emblem of resilience, survival, the certain triumph of hope and goodness made possible by love and by family. The sprig was dead, its leaves brown. George flung it into the cold hearth.
Behind him, the door rolled open. "I thought I heard you in here." When Constance kissed his cheek, he smelled the pleasant sweetness of chocolates. Her red hair was pinned up, her plump face shiny from a scrubbing.
She studied him. "What's wrong, dearest?"
"I don't know. I feel so damn miserable. I can't explain why."
"I can guess some of the reasons. Your brother's on his way to the other side of the continent, and you're probably feeling like those two men you told me about. The men at Willard's who admitted they missed the excitement of the war."
"I'd be ashamed to admit I missed killing human beings."
"Not killing. A heightened sense of life, like walking on the edge of a precipice. There's no shame in admitting that if it's the truth. The feelings will pass."
He nodded, though he didn't believe it. The near-despair seemed overwhelmingly potent.
"It will be even emptier here in a few weeks," he said. "William off to start at Yale, Patricia back in Bethlehem at the Moravian Seminary."
She stroked his bearded face with the cool back of her hand. "Parents always feel sad when the fledglings leave for the first time." She took his arm. "Come, let's walk a while. It will do you good."
In the hot night wind, they climbed the hill behind Belvedere. Away to the left below them spread the furnaces and sheds and warehouses of Hazard's, casting a red glare on the sky.
Unexpectedly, their path brought them to a place Constance would have preferred to avoid, because it symbolized despair. They were at the large crater produced by a meteorite that fell in the spring of '61, right at the time the war started.
George leaned over the edge and peered down. "Not a blade of grass. Not even a weed yet. Did it poison the earth?" He glanced at the path running on up the hill. "I suppose Virgilia passed this way the night she stole all that silver from the house."
"George, it doesn't help to recall only bad things."
"What else is there, goddamn it? Orry's dead. Tom Hassler wanders the streets with a mind that will never be right. We didn't strive hard enough to prevent war, and now we've inherited the whole rotten mess. They talk about the South's cause being lost. Well, so is America's. So is our family's. So is mine."
The chimneys of Hazard's shot spark showers into the night sky. Constance held him tightly. "Oh, I wish I could banish those feelings. I wish you didn't hurt so terribly."
"I'm sorry. I'm ashamed of how I feel. It isn't manly." He muffled an oath by burying his face in the warm curve of her throat. She heard him say, "Somehow I can't help it."
Silently, she prayed to the God in whom she devoutly believed. She asked Him to uncloud her husband's mind and lift his burdens. She begged Him not to add so much as one new burden, however small. She feared for George if that happened.
Silent in each other's arms, they stood a long time on the empty hill beside the dead crater.
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
August, 1865. She is here! — Miss Prudence Chaffee of Ohio.
She is twenty-three, very robust — she is the child of a farm family — and calls herself, without self-pity, a plain person. It is true. Her face is round and she is stout. But every word, every expression shines with a miraculous glow. Not of impossible perfection, but of dedication — the glow of those rare and decent people who will leave this earth better than they found it.
Her father must have been a special man, for he did not subscribe to the popular notion that education for young girls is a waste — even dangerous, because higher mathematics is too taxing for the female brain, science too indelicate, studies such as geography too threatening to the teachings of Genesis. She has faith and good training as well, the latter received at the Western College for Women.
She arrived with a valise of clothing, her Bible, a Pilgrim's Progress and a half-dozen of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers. The first evening, over a poor meal of rice, I tried to be honest about the obstacles we face, especially ill will from neighbors.
To that she said, "Mrs. Main, I prayed for this kind of situation. No reverses will defeat me. I am one of those lucky few St. Paul described in his Epistle to the Romans — 'Who against all hope believed in hope.' I am here to teach, and teach I shall."
Orry, I think I have found a confidante — and a friend.
... Prudence continues to astonish me. Took her this morning to the schoolhouse, already under construction halfway down the road to the abandoned slave quarters. Lincoln, our newest freedman, is roofing it with cypress shakes split by hand. Prudence said it was her school, so she should share the toil. Whereupon she hoisted her skirts between her legs and knotted them and scampered up the ladder. Lincoln looked stunned and embarrassed, though he quickly got over it when she began to drive nails as if born to it. I asked later about her skill.
"Papa taught me. He felt I must be prepared to provide for myself in every circumstance. I believe he felt — never saying it, mind — that no man would wed an ugly duckling with abolitionist views. I may marry someday. I told you I have hope. But whether that's true or not, carpentry is good to know. Learning anything useful is good. That's why I teach."
... To the Dixie Store this morning, which I had not seen since it reopened. The plump and white Mr. Randall Gettys, himself, greeted me from behind the counter.
Evidence of his literary pretension was prominently in view in an old woodbox on the floor. Secondhand copies of Poe, Coleridge, the novels of Gilmore Simms, doubtless bargained away by some impoverished landowner. Who will buy them, even at five cents each, I cannot imagine.